Gentle First Year: The Essential Guide to Mother and Baby Wellbeing in the First Twelve Months. Karen MacLeod Swan
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or doula would be delighted to make it for you during the first two weeks after the birth. The ingredients themselves are cheap and can be easily found at larger supermarkets or at Asian grocers (I found jaggery at Tesco).
WHAT TO DRINK
So your diet should be optimal, and so should your fluids. Keep off alcohol, especially spirits, but if manners or sanity dictate accepting a small tipple, limit it to one small glass of wine on very special occasions. If you can’t completely give up tea or coffee, please at least give up coffee and drink just cups of weak tea – but if your baby is unsettled or windy, you’ll have to come off it altogether. Herbal and green teas are ideal. Many midwives swear by fennel/nettle tea for reducing wind/colic/fretfulness in babies. Please remember to drink at least two litres of water per day, as hydrating yourself will boost your milk volume and quench your baby’s thirst. Keep a bottle of water next to your feeding chair and another next to your bed so that it’s always to hand – many mothers report a mad thirst as soon as they begin a feed.
PROBIOTIC SUPPLEMENTS
As with the gentle birth method, I advise you to top up your diet with probiotics to help encourage the growth of friendly bacteria in your gut and prevent thrush (which is very common in the first week after birth). And a supplement of digestive enzymes will ward off indigestion and prevent bloating, both of which are problems due to the massive hormonal shifts after birth. By extracting every morsel of goodness from your diet, these supplements will help boost the quality of your milk; and by eliminating wind from your digestive system, the milk you pass on to your baby should be correspondingly flat.
EXERCISE
Strenuous exercise should be avoided for the first few weeks, certainly the first three, and ideally introduced after six weeks. This is because your body is still tired from the birth and trying to recover. You will probably find that you are losing a lot of weight in these first few weeks anyway and added exercise could have a big effect on your milk production, especially in the early days. Your body needs an extra 500 calories per day just to breastfeed (that’s more than double the excess you needed during pregnancy) so do conserve your calories, or the quality of your milk will suffer.
COMPLEMENTARY THERAPIES
If you think your milk supply is low by the end of the first week, homeopathy can really help your milk come in. I recommend the following, three times a day for three days:
Sepia 30c – If you are exhausted
Cocculus 30c – If you are exhausted with broken sleep
China 30c – If you are exhausted from breastfeeding
I also prescribe to the mothers at my clinic a homeopathic remedy that supports breastfeeding. I source this remedy from a revered 95-year-old homeopath in India. The formula decidedly improves the quality of breast milk and is great for the early days during transition from colostrum to more copious quantities of breast milk. He has named it Lactors and the remedy includes Calc flour 6c, Lecithin 6c and Asafoetida 6c (see Resources for details).
Reflexology has long been known to improve lactation, and I always perform some reflexology on the new mothers at my clinic. It has now been formally trialled at one of the main teaching hospitals in London to see if it can improve breast milk production for mothers of premature babies, and the results were favourable. I hope this will mean a more widespread take-up of reflexology among postnatal health professionals such as midwives and health visitors, and at breastfeeding clinics.
Case History: Reflexology and Breastfeeding
One of my colleagues referred a mother of Asian origin to me, just one week after her baby was born. She was unable to produce any breast milk at all.
I prescribed deep reflexology three times a week, concentrating on the pituitary and hypothalamic reflex areas in the brain, as well as on the breast reflex and digestive areas. I also prescribed my favourite homeopathic remedy, Lactors, which improves breast milk production. Along with this I advised her to make a soup of small-boned fish like sardines or whitebait (see FISH SOUP AND GREAT MILK). She was advised to pressure-cook the fish – to really pulp it so that the bio-available calcium could be extracted from the fish to help her lactation. I also recommended a daily drink made from an infusion of fennel seeds (see below).
Within a day she went from producing 10 drops of milk to 50. A day later she was up to 10ml and then again up to 20ml. Within two weeks she was breastfeeding satisfactorily, even though she did supplement at night.
Recipe for Fennel Tonic
The Ayurvedic herbal tonic called Jeerarishtam is a boon to new mothers in India and improves lactation tremendously. The main ingredient of this preparation is fennel seeds, and for mothers who can’t get hold of Jeerarishtam, then a simple recipe is to take a teaspoon of fennel seeds, boil it in half a pint of water, reduce it down to a cupful and drink this daily for three months after the birth.
The following postnatal milk-boosting recipes are Syrian in origin, and contributed by one of my favourite mothers, Rima Stait.
Recipe for Chicken Broth Porridge
1 whole chicken
5 cups of boiling water
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup of Quaker Porridge Oats
Honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon
1 Cut the chicken into relatively small pieces. Place in a saucepan and cover with the boiling water.
2 Cover and boil for an hour. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
3 Allow to cool and remove all bones from the chicken, shredding the meat into bite-size pieces.
4 Boil the porridge oats with the remaining chicken broth (which should be about 4 cups) in the saucepan (without the chicken). Stir for 15 minutes over a low heat.
5 Add the chicken and stir occasionally for another 15 minutes.
6 Just before the end of cooking time, add honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon to taste.
NB You can substitute lamb off the bone for the chicken.
Recipe for Caraway Dessert
Traditionally this recipe is made by the grandmother, and it’s a labour of love.
6 cups of boiling water
2 cups of sugar
1 cup of powdered rice
¼ cup of caraway powder (see Resources)
2 tablespoons of cinnamon
Mixed nuts (pistachios, almonds, walnuts, pine nuts …)
1 Mix all the ingredients together in a saucepan, except for the nuts.
2 Leave to boil gently over a low heat for an hour, stirring continuously, until the mixture turns thick. (Thickness can be controlled by adding more boiling water if needed.)
3 Pour into small dessert glasses and refrigerate.
4 Soak the nuts in warm water for an hour and peel off any excess skin.
5 Remove the dessert from the refrigerator an hour or so before serving, as it is best eaten at room temperature. Sprinkle the nuts over each dessert glass.
Emotional Minefields
Baby Blues
One of the most oft-heard statements in the delivery room is: ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’ But I’ve long felt that statement has a lot to answer for because it implies that happiness is absolute, untainted by any other more complex emotions such as anxiety, anger or resentment. Three days later at home or on the postnatal ward when the baby blues kick in, it’s usually a different story anyway! Whilst for many mothers the love for their baby is instant, deep and undeniable, for equally as many others, the maternal response is cautious, fearful and even apathetic.
As I wrote earlier